THE police chief was unapologetic about the number of people her force had shot dead in Kisumu, western Kenya, to quell looting in the violent aftermath of last month’s disputed presidential elections.

“They don’t know another language except the gun,” said Deputy Police Commissioner Grace Kaindi, glancing up from her desk with pursed lips. A Kenyan police motto, “Keepers of the peace, defenders of the innocent”, hung on her office wall.

In the darkness of the mortuary a few hundred yards away, her force’s handiwork lay on the floor of three sweltering rooms: some 50 bodies under strips of crimson cloth with their feet poking out, waiting for families to collect them.

But that was not happening. The families of the dead were poor and could not afford funeral expenses. Others had still not been identified. A cloth strip across their foreheads said: “Unknown African”.

The tribalism that colours Kenyan life

The eruption of violence following Kenya's elections has brought to the fore the latent tribalism present in every day life

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• Video comment: Richard Dowden, Africa expert

• Video: violence in Nairobi

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The police ferried the bodies of the men they had shot to the mortuary. In the chaos, they brought some in alive, mixing them up with the dead, a priest said. Their suffering as they were left to die amid the corpses is unimaginable.

One after another, relatives filed in last week to check whether their loved ones were among those killed. “Yes, my son, your father is dead,” sobbed Christine Awino, 20, to her young son Joseph. The boy was waiting outside the main entrance, his aunt comforting him and telling him not to cry.

Waving goodbye to the dead, another woman walked through the rooms where they lay in rows, crying out: “We will be back to avenge you.”

David Otieno, a mortuary attendant, was exhausted. “I have never been so close to so much pain and death,” he said.

As he spoke, a blue police Land Rover drove up with another body, that of a man who had been stoned to death by a crowd for stealing a bicycle.

Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria, is Kenya’s third largest city and the stronghold of Raila Odinga, 62, the opposition leader. While much of the country was returning to normal last week, despite the unresolved crisis over the elections, Kisumu has not: it is still traumatised by the bloodshed, which was worse here than almost anywhere else.

Shops were open yesterday but in the bread queues snaking around the block there was bitterness, fear and anger at how a once peaceful place that had recently celebrated its centenary had been torn apart.

The essentials of the tragedy are not in dispute. Odinga and his supporters believe he was robbed of the presidency when the vote changed on December 29 after two days of counting and Mwai Kibaki, the 76-year-old president, suddenly surged ahead to win the election by a suspiciously narrow margin.

As the news spread, the city exploded. Kaindi said she was caught unawares. During the day Odinga supporters, mostly members of the Luo tribe like him, were coming into the centre of town to celebrate what they assumed would be a Luo victory over Kibaki, a member of the Kikuyu, Kenya’s dominant tribe. Many had been brought in convoys from outlying districts.

Some were shouting a popular Luo slogan: “Mali yetu [our wealth]”. The police chief interpreted this to mean they believed that after the victory of Odinga, who had promised a devolved system of government, the Luos would be free to kick out Kikuyus and other tribes and take their property.

Venting their rage on Kikuyus and Kisiis, who also supported the president, the crowd became unruly. Wielding sticks and stones, machetes and bows and arrows, it set ablaze shops, business premises and houses owned by non-Luos.

The Kikuyu and Kisii were the main sufferers, but the Luos also attacked Kenyan-Asian businesses. Flames engulfed the big supermarket and electronic store in Oginga Odinga Street, the main thoroughfare named after Odinga’s politician father.

At first the police used tear gas. “But the crowds kept on recovering. They kept on stealing, so eventually we had to shoot so that we could secure the town, which was in chaos,” Kaindi said.

“At first we shot in the air to scare them. But they knew we were not going to shoot them so they kept on coming.”

At 2.30pm, Kaindi said, she ordered the police to use live ammunition. “It was only after we had shot a few of them that they realised we were very mad.”

She denied there was a shoot-to-kill policy, as local religious leaders and rights activists have charged. “We were not shooting to kill. Where would the police have got that order?

“Nairobi was in flames, already burning. It was just me, as the police commander, and my officers using minimum force, who had to contain the situation. We did what we could.

But, it is true, there is no lack of dead bodies in Kisumu.”

That is an understatement. Over the next few hours the police shot 68 people dead. Very few police were injured and none killed, according to Kaindi. However, a priest said one police officer, a Luo, was shot dead by a fellow policeman after he was seen encouraging the crowd to loot Kikuyu property.

The following day, the police sealed off the three main roads into the town and called in paramilitary reinforcements. The paramilitaries opened fire as the rioting resumed after Kibaki was declared the winner and secretly sworn in as president.

This was when the rest of the killing happened. Eyewitnesses described how police shot 12 youths running away from them in Manyatta slum. By the time it was all over, nearly 200 shops had been looted and destroyed and a further 14 people had burnt to death, including five in the big supermarket. Scores were wounded. One girl was killed when a bullet passed through her mother’s body.

Kaindi said she was appalled by the presence of children as young as 10 sent to loot. She was puzzled by the organisation of the demonstrators. “We have never seen anything like this. Why, all of a sudden, do things begin between these tribes who have lived together peacefully all these years? It seems to me that somebody was controlling them,” she said.

Local Luo leaders deny planning the looting and tribal violence. They say it reflected the people’s rage at the way Kibaki had “stolen” the election. Kisumu’s church leaders and rights activists want the police crack-down to be investigated.

“It was a well calculated and executed shoot-to-kill policy and the proof is that most of the bullet wounds were on parts of the body which included vital organs,” said a local human rights worker. No investigation is expected to take place.

The killings in Kisumu fit an all-too-familiar pattern of Kenyan police brutality. Notorious for corruption, the police have often been tarnished as thieves and murderers. Last year they were accused of summarily executing several hundred members of a brutal criminal gang. No investigation followed.

In Kisumu, what comes next is hard to predict. Kaindi, the first woman police officer to be given charge of a province, is optimistic: “In Kenya nothing lasts for ever. We will quarrel and tomorrow we will be friends.”

Others are not so sure. “It is hard to forget the many who suffer in the hospitals or died in the streets from police gunfire before they ever got there,” said a young nurse as death drew nearer for the young man she tended. No doubt at the mortuary there will be more grieving women calling for revenge, too.

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